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Scan 69
The story of the violin, 1904
12 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Story of the Violin
3ment. It is never absent; and this is of some significance, as we shall have occasion to observe.
5Although this Eastern importation is the one oldest European representative of the violin family of which we possess documentary proof, it is by no means certain that it really and absolutely was the oldest. Not a few historians, indeed, are inclined to bestow this honour (of ancienité) on an instrument nearer home—viz., the Welsh crwth. Some readers will no doubt know from illustrations or descriptions this quaint instrument, now fallen into disuse and found only here and there in collections of curios, but still in use among Welsh bards as late as 1776, when—according to unimpeachable testimony 1—a certain bard, John Morgan, on the Isle of Anglesey, was able to evoke from it its now forgotten mysteries of sound. Its claim for being the oldest bow-instrument in Europe rests chiefly on the interpretation of two lines of an elegiac Latin poem of one Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, who lived between 560 and 609 A.D., thus more than a century prior to the alleged introduction of the Arabian rebab. The verse reads:
7"Romanusque lyra plaudat, tibi Barbarus harpa,
8Græcus achilliaca, chrotta Brittanna canat." 2
101 Archæologia; or, Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity, vol. iii., with a description by Daines Barrington.
112 Translated: Let the Romans applaud thee with the lyre, the Barbarian with the harp, the Greek with the cithara; let the British crwth sing.
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